


Welcome to Crazy Stan's

by Dartz (The_Fenspace_Collective)



Series: Candle In The Dark: A Peculiar Saga of the Sea of Time [10]
Category: BattleTech: MechWarrior, Fenspace, Gundam & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Giant Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:51:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1454359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Fenspace_Collective/pseuds/Dartz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>3021: The year's regular Convention is in full swing and with the whole 'transported to a universe full of giant robots who want to kill us' thing, the dealer's room is full of all sorts of interesting exhibits. Tinkerer and engineer Mackie Jaguar takes us on a tour of one company's attempts to win the jackpot with the Ultimate Giant Robot(tm).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcome to Crazy Stan's

_Excerpt from “ Life in the Machine” by Mackie Jaguar (Mechhead Press, A Baoa Qu, 3066):_

“The invasion showed just how bad our existing stuff was: _XR-71_ got hammered so bad during the Long March that we had to scrap her. Her cannons were great for surprising the sort of belt pirates we normally saw – they ripped right through conventional waved craft – but against dropship armor? Like trying to stop a juggernaut with spitballs. So once the situation had calmed down a little, everybody was on the hunt to find the perfect mech-killer.

Sis figured we should get in on the action. It was a chance to make some good money with hardware sales, and with the catgirls on the other side of the rock we could get some factory time, too. We could win by being in at the start of the new arms race. So we all got together and voted to bet the farm on grabbing a sales contract, the sort of thing that’d set us up nicely for a few years. Anyone with the right idea could get in and secure a place in the market, it was a great time.

The first thing we did was to find a way to replace the _XR-71_. I’m sure you’ve heard of the result, we tried to kill two birds with one stone. _Lun_ herself was armed to fight the last war – among other things. You know the details of that mission already.

With that taken care of, what we had to do was figure out what our best niche was. Conventional helicopters showed they could take on mechs and hurt them, so we dusted off the plans for the waved _Havocs_ and the _Hokum_. We had the tech to make Tanalloy batteries, even if we had to mine the stuff. We had some pretty good fusion tech – we knew how to use a fusion engine to drive a turbine, and we sort of knew how to use one to drive a bullet, too. The main problem there was the prototypes didn’t scale very well. Ford managed to build a bunch of handgun-sized variants, but getting something mech-sized meant calling in a favour from an enthusiast. And we had _Lun_ ’s missiles, which could drop a dropship the same way that Soviet pilot did.

There was one last thing we had; thanks to Daryl’s promotion to Sailor Frigga for (ahem) ‘conspicuous service during a classified mission for the Crown’ we managed to get a genuine battlemech and ASF to mess around with. For ‘testing purposes,’ you understand. This gave us a better understanding of how their gear worked than almost any small garagiste in Fenspace at that point.

We didn’t have the money or the gear to step into the ring with the big names – BAT spent as much on a thruster assembly as we did in a year – so we played to our advantages. Which is why, out of all the people looking for customers in the dealers room, we had the biggest variety of stuff. Nobody else was willing to throw it all at the wall and see what stuck. We had slightly improved fusion engines, super-high density batteries and an autocannon plus ammo bin combo that wouldn’t cook off no matter what you threw at it. To show it all off at the Convention, we put all of it into the best tech demonstrator Sis could design. We couldn’t beat them on armour, so we decided to go for something _fast_ , to use sheer speed as armour because it was the one big weakness of the Spheroid mechs. The things lumbered along. Move and shoot was our mantra, rather than a fair fight.

All this was based on the experience in Africa with _Lun_ and the Indians. The faster we could move and re-deploy, the better. Aerospace mode let us do some real hit-and-run fun. 

What we ended up with was a replica _Zeta Gundam_ , armed with a real fusion cannon that actually worked, powered by Stonewell-Bellcom engines and Tanalloy battery backup. The thing was huge, but it was seriously nimble for its size thanks to the cyberframe interface. The size and complexity of the build sucked up all our factory time for the year, and I ended up flying it all the way to the Con (Saturn again that year; I think they did it because they were addicted to the pun.) because we didn’t have a ship big enough to tow it. Got it up to 0.11 though, so the trip was sort of quick.

We get into the dealers room, and the whole thing is heaving with mecha. Sis spent most the first day just goggling over the competition. So did I, though my goggling was more over the flightsuits than the mechs to be honest. Anyway, we thought we had awesome, but for all the magnificence of our _Zeta Gundam_ we could barely keep up. There were _Zaku_ s, a _Freedom_ with full railgun compliment, a _Unicorn_ , a couple of _GM_ s, an _Astray_ , one guy who offered to build anything for the right price, a whole boatload of eclectics offering stuff as obscure as _Gypsy Danger_ , Heavy Gears, Arm-Slaves from _Full Metal Panic_ and I’ll swear to my dying day that there was one madboy in the corner shilling designs for an _Evangelion_. (I don’t remember if I ever told Shinji about that one.) Not a lot of BattleTech replicas though; I always thought nobody wanted to try it since the real deal was just over the hill, so to speak.

We ended up selling a grand total of one _Zeta_ , to an enthusiast, and straight up traded another for a _Kshatriya_ because Elpeo demanded it. The _Freedoms_ sold pretty well – can’t argue with full burst – but the _Zaku_ just caught on fire. XCOM saw that and made some guy very rich indeed. Looking back on it, I understand why too: it wasn’t the strongest mech in the hall, it wasn’t the coolest either, but it was cheap, tough and robust. After the Torrington trials, the number crunchers calculated it would take five _Zakus_ to kill a _Zeta_ , but you could build _six_ _Zakus_ for every _Zeta_. And that’s not counting the cyberframe; without that, it only took two and a half _Zakus_ to take one down. While in the aerospace regime, it still suffered from all the weaknesses of ordinary fen-craft, but our argument was that we never intended it as an aerospace fighter. 

Our gun designs went over fairly well. We sold a few based on ease of retrofitting to older designs, but ultimately they were just niche products. Most folks took a look at the heavy railcannon on sale and just fell in love, especially with the phrase ‘percentage of light speed.’ Sheer potential punch-through sold better at that point than our more flexible design. 

Our choppers went over far better in the aerospace section. Helium’s defense forces bought a squadron’s worth. But really, we were just there to get a look at the new anti-Sphere designs. Atalante’s prototypes caused a pretty big stir; BAT took the Land-Air Mech concept and just ran with it to insane new heights and I desperately wanted one. It was pretty much the exact opposite of our _Zeta_. I was almost ready to sign up with the Roughriders for one, they were so sexy, and then there was Gina in the new LAM duty flightsuit and… well, that’s another story altogether.

Anyway, the dealer’s room. It looked like we were going to lose the bet. The _Zeta_ was too expensive and too niche, the choppers and the guns were selling, but not enough to quite recoup expenses for building the _Zeta_. It looked like we were about to go back to the old ramen days when someone spotted the _Judy_.

The _Judy_ was… well, we didn’t even think about it. It was one of those designs we’d put together for our own use and just sort of churned over.  We only had one with us as a glorified forklift. That is, until a man in a dress uniform with medals down to here strolled up and told me he represented a major group looking for a long range, lightweight, airdroppable reconnaissance mech that could fit in as small a space as possible. And then he handed me an invitation to a competition.

Sis shat a brick when she saw the number of zeroes on the potential contract. The only problem was, we knew Prometheus Forge would get a similar invitation for their Tachikoma, so would Nemmelworths out of Mars, Ryune Mechatronics _Orguss_ and BAT was likely going to be involved too. Did we really want to play in the big leagues?

Ford said it best: ‘Screw it, let’s do it.’ So we did.

_Mackie Jaguar is a senior technologist at the Aznable Center for Mecha Design and a former battlemech test pilot with the Asagiri Engineering Works._


End file.
